I did THE SHELTERING SKY backwards. First, I saw the movie, expertly directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and beautifully shot by some no-talent named Vittorio Storaro, and, unfortunately, incomprehensibly scripted by Bertolucci and Mark Peploe. Ignorant of the text, I though enough of the film's sumptuous visuals to assign it ye olde "interesting failure" designation, but, when going weakly to... not so much bunt as slap hit for the film (enough to get on base provided you're crafty with the lumber or fleet of foot), I always found myself emphasizing the greatness of Ryuichi Sakamoto's tragic main theme, which has haunted me since I first heard it in the theatrical trailer. It was so evocative, I figured there must be something to the novel (a suspicion more than a little bolstered by the decades of plaudits bestowed by nearly every significant writer or literary critic of the twentieth century).
I read the first eighty pages of THE SHELTERING SKY while mired in Ohio for Christmas a month ago, and found myself accompanying Bowles's most transporting passages with Sakamoto's heartbreaking theme. This would offend Jonathan Rosenbaum, but he could do with some offending now and again, particularly when it comes to music criticism. I was actually familiar with Bowles's classical compositions before I was the movie, and they're just too complex to work alongside something so thematically involved. Having now finished Bowles's masterpiece, aside from Storaro's cinematography, I now realize that the only thing Bertolucci got right was Sakamoto's score. It gives clear voice to the emotional tumult and inner conflict of the piece, which, visually, is impossible to capture in a classical narrative motion picture. Bertolucci needed to go full-on formalistic with THE SHELTERING SKY, but the film unfortunately caught him at the most conventional (in a Hollywood sense) period in his career.
Happily, I now have the novel to blot out what is now just a failure in my estimation. And a tremendous score that I desperately need to track down.